Risk: How to Share Your Story Without Sacrificing Your Safety

Mar 22, 10am-2pm

Age Group: 18+

Level: All levels except brand new beginners.

Description:

We all have stories we want to share, but some feel scarier than others. If you have had your voice silenced, your lifestyle shamed, your foundation rocked by prejudice or discrimination, or you’ve been marginalized simply for living your true self, this workshop is for you. We will read excerpts from memoirists including Carmen Maria Machado and Annie Lanzillotto.

We will discuss how to create a safe space to write what you are meant to create by working with excerpts from Louise DeSalvo’s Writing as a Way of Healing. And we will use meditative practices like Chi Gong and Tai Chi Chuan to help us ground ourselves as we write our stories. We will take time to create a compost pile–writing that serves as fertilizer for the stories we want to share, the garden of writing we want to grow. We will write silently together, we will share when and if we feel ready, and we will leave with new tools to ground us in safety and security as we mine the deep stories of our lives.

By the end of this workshop, participants will have new tools to use to ground their physical and mental bodies as they embark on writing the difficult stories they want to share.

About the facilitator:

Nancy Caronia is a writer, scholar, and educator who co-edited Personal Effects: Essays on Memoir, Teaching, and Culture in the Work of Louise DeSalvo (Fordham University Press) and wrote the introduction for the reprint of DeSalvo’s only novel Casting Off (Bordighera Press). Nancy has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize and her creative writing has appeared in Don’t Tell Mama! The Penguin Book of Italian American Writing and Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture (Feminist Press) as well as numerous journals including Lowestoft Chronicles, BioStories, 94 Creations, New Delta Review, and Ovunque Siamo. She also created Labor on Broadway, which starred David Straithairn and William Wise, for The Working Theater in New York City. Her most recent publications include “Dime Novels and the Creation of the Italian Immigrant Criminal” for the volume American Contact: Objects of Intercultural Encounters and the Boundaries of Book History (UPenn Press) and “Refusing the Sentimental Italian Immigrant Story in Denise Giardina’s Storming Heaven” for the Journal of Working-Class Studies for which she received the Working-Class Studies Association Russo & Linkon Award. Nancy is a long-time Tai Chi practitioner and loves sharing this moving meditation through her writing workshops and seminars.

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Note: All workshop participants will have the opportunity to publish at least one work with Write Pittsburgh during the year in which the workshop was taken. Workshop participants will also be invited to share their work publicly either in-person or online at Write Pittsburgh events hosted throughout the year.